The present invention relates to assembly of micro-electronics, opto-electronics and photo-electronics and, more particularly, to a bondline control fixture, an active bondline control fixture and a method of passively or actively affixing first and second components.
In various technologies, there is frequently a need for attaching two standard pick and place components together. In some cases, the components may include a flexible polymer component with a standard optical interface and polymer waveguides extending outwardly from a side of the interface along a lower surface of a compliant extension and a photonic integrated circuit (IC) with photonic IC waveguides on an upper surface of a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) element. Previously, one of the components has been picked up with a picker arm and placed on the other component with that other component residing on a base. Both the picker arm and the base may move in X-, Y- and Z-directions in order to position the components with respect to each other.
However, no specific control is used to ensure that the parallelism between the picker arm and base surfaces is tightly controlled. In the case of the components being the flexible polymer component and the photonic integrated circuit (IC), this lack of parallelism impedes the enablement of an adiabatic coupling of light signals from the polymer waveguides to the photonic IC waveguides.